John Miedema

Reading as a Creative Act, Pt. 1

There are many kinds of reading. I glance at the nutrition facts on a box of cereal in the morning, and at street signs in traffic. My eyes scan email and news snippets in iGoogle. I scroll through technical documents and pages of code faster than other eyes can follow. I may speed read chapters of a text book. When I really want to understand a complex idea, or savour a pleasurable read, I seek out a print book and read it slowly. Reading is not just one behaviour. We may discount scanning as a robotic operation, but maybe that is how robots read. I count scanning as one form of reading. In reference to young readers, Ross says we should not dismiss online reading as an enemy of literacy. In contrast to stereotype of reading as a serious scholar pondering a tome, Ross argues for an expanded definition of reading, including the scholar but also the gamer with a digital help file. I am in strong agreement with this view.

The subject of the current inquiry is one particular kind of reading. It is associated with slow reading, the kind of reading one does at a reflective pace. Certainly, slow reading is often about reading more slowly in time, but it has other meanings too. Whenever a person brings more of one’s being or psyche to bear upon a work, he or she is slow reading. This is accomplished in many ways: selecting a challenging work, researching the context of the book, choosing the right setting to open up to a particular idea, and so on. Of course, most of these actions will slow down the reading in time.

Some readers immediately brighten at the phrase, slow reading. They like the positive connection with the larger slow movement, and the way it validates their usually unspoken preference to avoid rushing their reading. Others conjure up negative associations of dusty old librarians and resistance to change. For the present inquiry, I wish to avoid any associations, positive or negative.

For the current theme, I am conducting a phenomenology of a certain kind of reading that I call “reading as a creative act”. You have heard of creative writing; this is creative reading. Reading is often viewed as a passive activity. Passive activities can be beneficial as a form of relaxation, but creative reading is not passive. One idea I borrow from my material on slow reading is that creative reading is a third way of reading:

Slow reading is an art form, a third way of reading not just for information or entertainment. The reader calls upon creative faculties and is changed in the process of reading. It has both the serious purpose of reading non-fiction to better understand things, and the playful imagination of reading fiction to see things in new ways. There is no artifact of this art form; no book, no painting, no sculpture; but like all good art, the act of slow reading exercises our imagination to develop interiority, our psychological framework.

Echoing the last sentence, the creative product of this process is the development of interiority, an inner self. It begins as an inner event but it is not navel gazing. Rather, creative reading is the kind of reading that calls out blind spots in one’s own perspective. Creative reading is risky because it means turning over assumptions for inspection, the possibility of appearing foolish, and the willingness to reconsider cherished beliefs. It is a process of discovery with a trajectory into the world and mystery. It is captured nicely by this poem by William Blake, given to me in 1986 by a high school English literature teacher:

I give you the end of a golden string;
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate,
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.

Thwaite, Mark (October 12, 2009). The demand of reading. ReadySteadyBook: A literary site. http://www.readysteadybook.com/Blog.aspx?permalink=20091012155110. Quoting his quote: “the question of literature … is no longer a parochial question about values and tastes, but a directly philosophical question about the status of the human being”